‘There Will Be No PS5’

According to Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, the PS4 will be part of the last generation of home consoles.

“The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are likely to be the last dedicated games consoles as we know them,” Shear told The Guardian.

“The problem is, the seven-year upgrade lifecycle doesn’t work in the face of the two-year upgrade cycles for every other hardware platform,” he explained. “It’s so intrinsically built into how consoles get manufactured and made and the full business model, that I’d be surprised to see another generation.”

While Shear thinks we’re not necessarily going to see a PS5, he does thinks consoles have something of a future, if not in the form we are used to.

“They’re going to have to change form,” Shear said. “You can already see this on both Xbox and PlayStation where there’s a tighter upgrade loop for both the operating systems and the games. This is the first step toward being able to iterate the hardware platform. I could imagine a version 1.1 product from both Microsoft and Sony which adds in slightly more speed and slightly more memory very similar to how phones and tablets work today. I think it’s going to look more like the mobile phone market over time.”

Shear isn’t the first person to predict that consoles will die out and there’s no doubt that the exponential growth of technological capabilities presents a challenge for the likes of Sony. Still the PS4 is doing pretty well right now, so it could be a little too early to call time on console’s in their current form.